Making Prussians, Raising Germans: A Cultural History of Prussian State-Building After Civil War, 1866-1935

Reframing the German War of 1866 as a civil war, Making Prussians, Raising Germans offers a new understanding of critical aspects of Prussian state-building and German nation-building in the nineteenth century, and investigates the long-term ramifications of civil war in emerging nations. Drawing transnational comparisons with Switzerland, Italy and the United States, it asks why compatriots were driven to take up arms against each other and what the underlying conflicts reveal about the course of German state-building. By addressing key areas of patriotic activity such as the military, cultural memory, the media, the mass education system, female charity and political culture, this book elucidates the ways in which political violence was either contained in or expressed through centre-periphery interactions. Although the culmination of Prusso-German state-building in the Nazi dictatorship represented an exceptionally destructive outcome, the solutions developed previously established Prussian-led Germany as one of the most successful states in recovering from civil war.

Author: Jasper Heinzen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 08/31/2017
Pages: 386
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.70lbs
Size: 9.51h x 6.42w x 0.92d
ISBN: 9781107198791

About the Author
Heinzen, Jasper: - Jasper Heinzen is a lecturer in modern European history at the University of York, having taught before at the Universität Bern, Switzerland. He has published on the Second German Empire, European international relations and the place of the Napoleonic Wars in European collective memory, and is currently writing a book about the use of honour codes as a transnational medium of communication among prisoners of war in the nineteenth century. His work has been awarded the Prize for Best Dissertation on Lower Saxon History by the Historical Commission of Lower Saxony and Bremen, and the Royal Historical Society's Alexander Prize, and his research has been funded by the British Arts and Humanities Research Council and a Marie Curie Fellowship.